My students are in the midst of carrying out their Project Work assignments and one of their tasks is to gather primary data to support their research.

This is where you can help them out – they need survey respondents from as diverse a range of people as possible to ensure their findings are accurate.

Hence, we’d really appreciate it if you could help us out by completing the following surveys:

• Introduction of a possible library service to facilitate the borrowing/loan of library books.
• Suggested changes to the Singapore education system in the future.

Once you’re done with the surveys, please help us spread the word to your friends.

Last but not least, remember that you’re not just a number – if Whitney Houston is anything to go by, you’re helping to shape the future of Singapore with each click of your mouse button!

So don’t wait – participate in their surveys now!

I know some of you are still confused about the characters and the action in the play, so I’m going to share some web resources with you, which I hope will provide you with more guidance in your study of Richard III.

What’s important is that you invest some time and effort into reading all the material including your text. You must also actively re-read your materials and refer to them continuously e.g. refer to the family trees as you read the history. This will help you make the connections which you need to better understand the play.

If you do this diligently and in a disciplined fashion, I guarantee that you will see the academic pay-off sooner than later.

1. Student Guide to the Play.
   This Insight Text Guide may be a six-page preview but I think it will help to clarify some of your doubts.

2. A Brief History of Richard III and the War of the Roses.
   I covered this in my introductory lecture, which can be found on Moodle along with notes for revision. If you feel that you need more background context/information, you can find it here:
   • You Can’t Tell the Players without a Scorecard.
     This is a simplified history which is quite different from the action in the play. Please bear this in mind when you read this article.
   • Richard III – A Man and his Times
     Another summarised history, which again is very different from the play we are studying. I’d like you to read this for insight into writing style; the tone of this article differs from the previous as it tries to dissuade the reader from believing the traditional portrayal of Richard III.
3. Family Trees.
   Last but not least, many family trees which you must refer to when you read the above material or the play, so that you can attempt to map the interactions between each character, or at least differentiate one similarly-named character from the other. A gentle reminder: there is also a Plantagenet Family Tree on p. 262 of your text.

(via Ansen’s Formspring.me page)

For those without image suppork:

Question: how to do lit ):
Answer: dunno i havent do:p

Question: What kind of lit rep are you?!
Answer: errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr r u mr laremy pretending to be my classmate?

Eh… Not me lei *makes whale sounds*

In any case, I have decided to get my own Formspring.me page too!

According to a Stanford psychologist, you’ll reach new heights if you learn to embrace the occasional tumble.

(via)

~

This was quite meaningful for me because of two portions, one of which was this:

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized … that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

It’s helped me to realise why I took a certain something too seriously – I had been too focused on performance as opposed to learning, considering the stage I was/am at. I guess it was also, in part, due to mismanaged expectations. But better to learn this later than never.

The second thing which I found meaningful was this:

Dweck’s study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation. But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. “We took ordinary children and made them into liars,” Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who’d been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Am going to start saying ‘good effort’ instead of just ‘good’ from now on!

Sounds familiar, though it is a story that is not entirely of my telling.

The rule is that when you have been absent from school, you have to bring a letter of excuse. He knows his mother’s standard letter by heart: “Please excuse John’s absence yesterday. He was suffering from a bad cold, and I thought it advisable for him to stay in bed. Yours faithfully.” He hands in these letters, which his mother writes as lies and which are read as lies, with an apprehensive heart.

When at the end of the year he counts the days he has missed, they come to almost one in three. Yet he still comes first in class. The conclusion he draws is that what goes on in the classroom is of no importance. He can always catch up at home. If he had his way, he would stay away from school all year, making an appearance only to write the examinations.

Nothing his teachers say is not already written in the textbook. He does not look down on them for that, nor do the other boys. In fact, he does not like it when, now and then, a teacher’s ignorance is exposed.

– Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee, pp. 107 – 108.

Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature will be launched next week, so be sure to get it when it’s out in stores.

1. Roads = traffic = exhaust fumes = global warming. This probably increases exponentially during traffic jams which occur during the morning and evening rush hours. Why are they rush hours? Because the bulk of the people are commuting to work/school. Why are we still commuting to work/school en masse when technology empowers us to work at disparate locations?
2. Warm temperatures in SG = increase in usage of air-conditioning = increase in electricity generation = increase in both fuels burnt (at power station’s end) and machines working (compressors and the like) = increase in output of heat = increase in temperatures in SG = global warming. Is air-conditioning the only way to reduce temperatures in SG, and on a macro level, the world?

It seems to me that both of these ‘problems’ are caused by sociological factors.

1. People, especially Singaporeans, place great value on ‘showing your face’. So be it for work or for school, the indicator people still stick to in order to measure work carried out or amount learnt is physical attendance. Perhaps this entails a paradigm shift: if we can harness the power of technology to delegate work or conduct lessons, we reduce the need for people to ‘show their faces’. Though it might mean an increase in computing power,  electricity generation, etc. which might also contribute to global warming. But at least there aren’t traffic jams, right?
2. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, we still stick to ‘Western’ dress codes of suits, jackets, long-sleeved shirts, tailored pants, etc. to go to work. Why? It doesn’t make sense to do so especially in our weather. Logically, we should be wearing clothes that aren’t so warm but we aren’t. Inadvertently, this artifically increases our dependence on air-conditioning. So will this blind embrace of ‘Western’ culture secretly be our undoing (and because I cannot resist it: what has happened to our Asian values??? LOL.)?

Your thoughts/comments?

Dear friends,

Migrant Voices is building Singapore’s first oral history archive for foreign workers.

Oral history is a special type of in-depth interview. Interviewees are simply asked to tell us their ‘life story’ with minimum intervention and questioning. They need to take stock of their lives in the course of telling their stories. In this way, the individual’s perspective can be revealed holistically, and in indirect and revealing ways.

We believe that a public archive of interviews with migrant workers can benefit both workers and Singaporeans. Telling one’s own life stories to interested listeners can be a tremendously healing and empowering experience. The archive will be used to:

• educate the public,
• help policy researchers and activists, and
• instigate change in the working and living conditions of the workers.

Without this “body of evidence” on the modern phenomenon of migrant labor, the voices of the very people at the heart of the process will simply vanish from public record and public memory.Would you be interested in taking part as an interpreter in these interviews, or as a translator behind the scenes? Drop me an email and I’ll send you more information.

Best wishes,

Shengpei
Project Co-ordinator
Migrant Voices Oral History Archive

However, you do need to refer to the questions he has posed or the statements he makes in order to understand my replies to him in context, so I’d appreciate it greatly if you could please read the comments in their entirety.

We had a forum of sorts at the NIE the other day, and I raised an issue which has been close to my heart for some time. I’m gonna raise it again here now, not only because it needs to be talked about, but also because I want to save it somewhere for posterity.

My stand:

The teaching of Literature in schools should preferably center on contemporary writers, both local and global. We should only teach Shakespeare and similar writers at the university level.

Reasons/Explication:

1. “Shakespeare and similar writers” = anything that was published before the student’s own parents were born. To be more specific:
2. “Contemporary” = an inversely proportional function which I will work on establishing so it doesn’t seem arbitrary. It should be something along the lines of: for students sitting for the ‘O’ level in 2009, year that work was published should be between 10 – 15 years ago. For students sitting for the ‘A’ level in 2009, year that work was published should be between 16 – 30 years ago. For undergraduates, the period/genre/text type etc. is fair game – they are majoring in Literature, after all.
3. Reason for the above: we don’t want to spend too much time deciphering the language. The ‘contemporary’ rule ensures that the language and themes are accessible to the students.
4. One argument against my stand: Shakespeare’s work is beautiful; we stand to lose more than we gain if we stop teaching his work. My view: I agree. His work rocks. But a majority of students really have a problem with the language (I will touch on this in my next point). Why turn them off from Literature right from the start? Maybe one way to negotiate this is to update the language used in Shakespearean works, but literary purists are going to have a problem with that as well.
5. Another argument against my stand: students must be trained to work with the language; it’s part of the struggle to learn; there’s nothing very difficult if they try, etc. My response: The people who make this argument (and the other arguments for keeping Shakespeare in teenage students’ syllabuses) often have what I term as ‘the privilege of context’. They’re born into certain families and have access to certain kinds of environments and education which ease the struggle somewhat. For the rest of the students who don’t have these privileges, reading itself might even be a problem. We must keep them in mind when teaching.
6. Last but not least, an argument against my stand has a bit of flawed logic in it. It goes something like this: if I went through the Singapore system and I studied Shakespeare, and I came out of it unscathed, so can the other students. No. That’s like saying we shouldn’t fix what’s broken – when we actually don’t know it’s broken because we can’t see the cracks. Furthermore, it adopts a very selfish viewpoint: I’m like this, so everyone can be the same too. The only reason why we came out of it unscathed was because: (a) even if we had problems, we could overcome it because of our inherent traits or determination to do well, and (b) See point (5).

There’s probably more to say but I’ve exhausted my words for now and I’ve to go for the production soon. But I’ll definitely want to revisit this topic again if I have the chance or if more ideas spring to mind. Nevertheless, feel free to add in your thoughts in the comments section, if you have any.